Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Professor, amazingly, was laughing. He said, “What?”

“Not only are you a nigger, you’re a fucking cripple.”

I was horrified, but Professor started giggling like a kid. I still couldn’t figure out how Tony did it.

For some reason, I often ended up in line at the mess hall standing next to an attorney from New York City. Mike usually told me how he had the government on the run with all his fancy legal maneuvers. Mike had robbed his clients of money they invested with him and took the position that they should’ve known better. Today Mike was talking about a hot new business scheme he had for when he busted out of here.

“You hear about how they can implant a fertilized egg from one woman to another?”

“I’ve read that, yes,” I said. “Like they do with cattle, right?” The line moved ahead and I took a step. Mike followed.

“Right. But with people? Wow! There’s a fortune in this,” Mike said.

“Yeah, I guess a lot of women will have that done. Infertile couples, and all that.”

“Naw. That’s not what I mean. There’s some money that way, too, but you have to be a doctor to cash in on that. What I want to do is even more brilliant. Attorney work.”

I asked how an attorney could cash in on fetal transplants.

Mike grinned. “Simple. You buy fertilized eggs from beautiful blond couples, you know? Good stock; they make just the kind of kids that are in demand. Then you take these eggs to someplace like Haiti and hire native women to carry the fetus to term. Get it?”

“Black women give birth to blond babies?”

“Right! Do you have any idea what blond babies are worth on the adoption market?”

I shook my head.

“Hundred, two hundred thousand. That’s what. You use these niggers like ovens. They hatch the kids; I arrange the adoptions. Millions.”

I stared at Mike. He was smiling like he’d discovered how to turn lead into gold. I think he was a sociopath.

“What do you think?”

“Millions,” I said, nodding.

“Right!” Mike said, laughing.

When we got into the mess hall, I made sure we were in separate serving lines.

I didn’t see Mike in the chow line for a few days. I heard from John Tillerman, who worked as a clerk in administration, that they’d sent him out for “diesel therapy.” Mike had succeeded in getting a judge in New York to review his case and the judge called him before his court. That happened now and then, and the Bureau of Prisons had busses traveling all over the country transferring prisoners from prison to prison and sometimes delivering them to court dates.

If you were not a troublemaker like Mike, they usually gave you a legal furlough and let you fly to wherever you had to go. Mike had pissed off too many people; the prison elected to send him by bus to New York. Normally that might take a few days. But when diesel therapy was prescribed, the route was not direct. They switched you from one bus to another, making your trip an arduous zigzag tour of the whole country with extended visits at county jails while you waited for the next connection. John said they’d put Mike on the bus two days ago to make his court date in six weeks. Mike would be spending his days on a prison bus, in handcuffs, his nights in one squalid county jail hole after another. I figured it was justice.

At work one day, we heard that Tony Abruzzo had a heart attack while playing tennis. They shipped him to Lexington, to the Bureau of Prison’s main hospital. We heard he was doing okay, but he’d miss the big talent show, the Eglin Frolics.

The inmates had built a stage across the salad bar and set some patio clamp lights up all around it. It was standing room only when I got there. I sat on the low serving-line wall with John Tillerman. Everybody was hooting and waving, having a great time. I saw Red the counterfeiter sitting with Joe the materials engineer. Red told everybody he was here for making his own money. He owned a print shop and got curious about how they printed money one day. He went to a bank and, as a businessman, asked them how he could detect counterfeit bills. They told him how and gave him a pamphlet about it. Red took this information and started making money that’d pass. His money wasn’t a work of art, he said. The bills all had the same serial number. He claimed it didn’t matter. The secret, Red said, was to condition the money so it looked circulated. He’d come up with just the right mixture of dirt and oil and stones that he dumped into a washing machine with his freshly minted hundred-dollar bills. A couple of hours later, he said, the bills looked like they’d been in circulation for years. He sold this handmade money to people for twenty to forty cents on the dollar and made real money. He told me he knew he’d be caught eventually, but he’d been saving up for it.